Defined as a little-understood component of process management, monitoring serves as a powerful tool to ensure that governance ethics and compliance processes upheld to work and improve. PCs, tablets, smartphones, BYOD and other devices pose serious threats to enterprise networks, creating a potential point of entry for hackers to exploit. Although standard policies and compliance monitoring is a clear expectation, Deloitte & Touche LLP and IBM survey state that 40% of companies do not perform an annual compliance risk assessment ­ With 191 days being the average length of time taken for organizations to identify a data breach.

IT managers are often burdened with the task of separating the up-to-date, properly managed endpoints from the unmanaged, unpatched and potentially infected or rogue devices, leaving zero room for tracking compliance deviations. How can enterprises secure data as it passes through personal computer systems, whilst satisfying auditors and protecting systems? One major step in such a process is the removal of local admin access on machines. Keeping the previous article of overall Endpoint Security in mind, detection of non-compliant devices through inbuilt queries can identify employees with admin rights, taking away their access to install, modify and delete software and files as well as change system settings. Unlike systems that simply flag violations, a tool that targets high-priority threats and helps remediate deviations through alerts segregated under device and OS categories needs an election for comprehensive security management.

Speaking of access, the cyber hazard from USB drives is also multi-dimensional and it’s no secret that the human aspect of any organization is its weakest link. Making it a security backdoor that’s open, it’s one of the easiest ways to maneuver data leading to loss of valuable particulars from the organization. So can enterprises improve their security by pulling the plug on USB ports? Not quite possible is it! From finance to IT, software applications have licenses, often worth thousands of dollars per license, that are tightly administered and authenticated through USB dongles. With Sentient it’s possible to discover devices with an open USB port along with the exact specifics of machines, identifying illegitimate data transfer.

A recent study by Datamonitor found that as many as one-third of IT decision-makers believe that a major data loss incident at their firm could lead to bankruptcy, with hard drive susceptibility being an inescapable reality in the modern business world. Although hard drive manufacturers claim less than a 1% failure rate, research indicates that a 2%-4% failure rate is more common and under some conditions may even reach as high as 13%. With enterprises dealing with sensitive data choosing to encrypt hard drives as part of compliance, Sentient conducts further drill downs to identify devices where disk encryption software is enabled. Although, no single mitigation strategy can prevent a targeted cyber intrusion, making knowledge of all threat vectors the first line of defense. As a small step towards closing this gap, Sentient correspondingly maintains a high degree of compliance by offering another layer of compliance ­ prevention of unapproved and potentially vulnerable installation of software on enterprise machines.

Remitting a holistic, seamless view of compliance by uniting processes in a single tool, Sentient lets you trace down compliance related deviations in no time thereby protecting your endpoints from being compromised. To throw some light on the solution that can help tackle data and prepare your teams to better manage evolving risks, comply with regulations, and meet remediation requirements we have put together a video. Safeguarding your business from financial penalties and reputational damage, Accelerite Sentient seamlessly integrates a web-based interface that enables you to run natural language-like queries for all your endpoints.